


Eight Miles High

by Morbane



Category: Sherlock (TV), Zombieland (2009)
Genre: Constructive Criticism Welcome, Crossover, Gen, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 20:43:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2164515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a story about an airplane ride over to England one time.</p><p>“Most people blunder around this city and all they see are streets and shops and cars… When you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see the battlefield. You’ve seen it already.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eight Miles High

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stellatundra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellatundra/gifts).



“The problem with refugees,” Sherlock Holmes says to John Watson, “is that they don’t have habits.”

John would suppose that the problems with refugees are stress; the severance of ordinary support groups such as family, neighbours, workmates, or friends; irregular diet; irregular sleep; and in many cases, physical or emotional trauma; but that is merely a medical opinion. He listens.

“Ordinary people live by their habits,” Sherlock says. “Habits leave marks. Stepping out of their habits makes them nervous, and those marks show up.”

In some ways, John thinks, that amounts to the same thing: the shock of being forced outside one’s routines.

“What you’re saying,” he says dryly, “is that everyone in this camp is acting like a guilty party.”

“Yes,” Sherlock says. “It’s tiresome.”

Sherlock is beginning to acquire a new reputation. He appears at one of the converted warehouses or tent cities that have sprung up irregularly throughout the Home Counties, and discovers at once who runs the black market, who runs interference, and who might be running from their past. John thinks it’s the most genuine policing work Sherlock has ever done. Mycroft has asked him to keep the peace, and, long-sufferingly, he does, by ensuring that no one gets away with anything.

Britain, as a whole, got away with a lot. The government began the evacuation of London on an official pretext of a health scare, expertly seeded. As it happened, no one in England was yet sick, but it was only a matter of time. Then the news from America began to spread, and the smoke screen blew away, just as the first zombies appeared in London.

London, Sherlock says, was always doomed. He sounds quite ghoulish himself when he discusses it. There was always going to be an outbreak in one of the largest cities in the world; the goal was to ensure as many people as possible got out early, and to keep the country running. 

Many people did get out – especially the itinerant workers and holidaymakers who had other homes to return to, in the weeks before world air travel was locked down. The government is still running – familiar names from the House of Commons take their place in the news of the day. That might, John thinks, have prompted a sense of complacence. Everyone seems to believe the Prime Minister’s broadcasts, which say that things are progressing as expected. They believe Mycroft. They go a step further and dream they’ll be home by Christmas.

Christmas comes, and passes.

* * *

They've seen what heat and humidity do to zombies. It’s not much. It's Little Rock’s idea to head north for the winter.

“Maybe they’ll freeze in the snow,” she says, “and stay frozen.”

“Zombies ain’t got antifreeze,” Tallahassee agrees.

“Unless maybe they do,” Columbus says, but he says it very quietly and nobody hears him. 

He's starting to think of himself as the pessimistic extreme, and Little Rock as the optimistic extreme, of their little group. Although Little Rock’s no Pollyanna, unless Pollyanna had a bloodthirsty smile. This is what it means to be a team (and why he’s never liked it), he supposes – like being a single brain. It's okay to be a little off-center. If the others all disagree with him, that’s okay too; it doesn’t mean they’re crazy ones, it means they’re keeping him sane.

Supposedly.

Like: everyone has nightmares about the zombies, right? It isn't even something they've talked about, it's just something he assumes.

Columbus's nightmares are about zombies whose eyes shoot fire and whose touch turns the skin black. He dreams about zombies who fly through the air and zombies who walk underwater until they walk up on the beaches of completely different continents. When he wakes up, he tells himself they haven't seen any of these things, but it's not as if the things they _have_ seen match up to the rules of the world they used to know.

He’s a very good shot nowadays. He thinks of it as levelling up. He tells himself never to forget how dangerous this is, how thin a margin there is between death and survival – that’s going to be rule 38 when he figures out snappy wording for it – but nowadays, he’s tempted not to double-tap. He’s tempted to stay around and watch as the zombies thrash instead of running away. It’s not bravery at all. He just wants more data for a pattern. He wants them to make sense.

He has hunches and theories, but what they know never really gets as far as science. Meanwhile, they’re getting further away from the front line. They find an air base in Maine. They find people.

* * *

Maine, of course, isn’t the first time the four of them see other actual humans. There are signs. In Memphis, there’s a sign at the city limit, repainted with instructions that start: IF YOU ARE NOT A ZOMBIE… and include an address. They don’t go there straight away, of course. They drive into the city and park eight blocks over, and then Columbus loses a coin toss and stakes out the place. He sees nothing. A zombie shambles past and collapses a hundred yards down the road. Columbus drinks water slowly and watches the zombie. For a while, it stays collapsed. Columbus wonders about hibernation and other sleep states. Then a gust of wind blows leaves down the street, and Columbus gets to watch the zombie wake up – twitching all over, then shaking into a crawl, lurching after the leaves. It seems to get up on its feet almost by accident. Columbus wonders what re-started it – the pressure of the wind? The sound of the leaves? Zombies don’t feel pain, as far as they can tell, but it seems like part of their nervous system still works.

The next day, Little Rock and Columbus play trick-or-treat while Tallahassee and Wichita provide cover. But there’s only an old woman behind the door. “The others all went east,” she tells them. They give her a can of soup and a bag of sugar. Columbus thinks about how this old woman might be the last other human being in Zombieland, and how they’d never know. The end of the world, ironically enough, isn’t a story with an end to it; for that, there would have to be someone to tell the story, and someone to hear it.

* * *

John finds Sherlock in a warehouse, in a curtain-partitioned space that's seven feet wide and seven feet deep. The violin's leaning up against the only chair; the coat hangs from a cable that attaches to the ceiling far above. John wonders how Sherlock got it up there. John doesn't see Sherlock's favourite skull; then again, it's not shocking in this environment. Or, it's shocking for the wrong reasons. Death's everywhere, but contamination is frightening. If someone thought Sherlock had scavenged it off the side of the road, they'd probably throw it in a fire.

"We got back two days ago," John says. "Ten refugees. One casualty. How've you been?"

"I thought I'd start a new blog," Sherlock says. "The science of destruction."

John wonders who _might_ have a blog nowadays. Operations Central has an intranet, of course, but in a post-pet world, the cute cat pictures are a bit morbid. He doesn't rise to the bait.

"You're right," Sherlock says. “I should make it a community newsletter. To go with my other community services.”

“Ah,” John says. “Right.” He waits, upwards of a minute, but Sherlock doesn’t say anything else. John isn’t any good at figuring out what Sherlock wants if Sherlock won’t tell him; he has a job, and it isn’t this. He is suddenly tired. He tells himself the mission he’s just returned from is catching up with him. He nods, turns away.

The violin twangs.

* * *

They arrive at Langham because they see the plane. It’s kind of ironic that they leave on one, too.

Zombieland defaults to a no-fly zone. Well, Tallahassee says he saw a plane go overhead one time, before he met up with the rest of the gang, but he says it had strange markings and he reckons it was foreign. Probably military. Figures.

But this one is small. It passes over their heads, and as they watch, they realize that it’s losing altitude. Way off in the distance, it’s coming in to land. They follow it home.

The guards at Langham’s gate make them park ‘3 outside the perimeter. There are a lot of cars, actually, most of them more beat up than ‘3, all lined up so neatly it looks surreal. “Leave your stuff in the car,” a guard tells him, and Columbus decides that’s a good sign: the people here don’t even care what supplies they have with them. They must have plenty, right?

Of course, these guards could be planning to shoot Columbus and gang the moment they walk in the gates, but why would they wait that long?

So, it’s easy to get in, but what follows is 48 hours in a cell. “Sorry about this,” a woman says when she passes food under the door, “but we have to make sure you aren’t infected.”

Fair, but two whole days seems kind of anal.

It’s an impression they keep the whole winter long.

It’s funny. Langham is paranoid, if you can narrow a community of a thousand people down to just one DSM-V diagnosis. But it’s the kind of paranoid Columbus always expected. No one trusts them. No one pretends to trust them. The people at Langham have been running things their own way for eight months – Columbus suspects that that’s actually longer than zombies have been on the scene – and they don’t play well with others. But he never used to, either.

They ask him his name and it’s been so long since he used it that he pauses. “Chris,” he says. Wichita rolls her eyes behind Tallahassee’s back.

They stick him in the electronics workshop. “Sorry,” they say, not really sounding sorry, “but we don’t give anyone gun training for the first three months.”

“That’s okay,” Columbus says. “I know how to shoot a gun.”

He’s not sure that’s the right answer, but it seems to be. Probably because of the ‘okay’.

The section leader in the electronics workshop is Diane. She’s the first person he thinks of as anything other than a Langham goon. She teaches him how to service the generators. Then, how to hook up the generators – and the hand-powered dynamos, and the solar panels – to things that were never designed to be hooked up to any of those things. Diane doesn’t seem to care that she’s teaching him about the support system of the entire compound. He learns about circuit boards and remote controls, thermostats and timers.

He doesn’t see the others very often. The Langham goons are a bit twitchy about ‘non-integrators’, which means just sticking with your group. So he fades out on Wichita and Little Rock and Tallahassee for a while. There’s a lot to do. Chores and hydroponics and construction. Turns out they were right about the zombies and winter – kind of – and relatively safe through December and January. But everyone’s edgy about spring.

He looks up from his breakfast one morning – cereal, and hoorah for preservatives – to Little Rock’s stare. (She goes by Mandy here, but even though he remembers that most of the time, remembering to _call_ her that is something different.)

“Hey,” he says. “I miss you.” It comes out completely without him planning it, because he never would have planned to say anything that pointless or embarrassing.

Little Rock munches down her Fruit Loops. “You seem like you’re fitting in just fine.”

“I’m biding my time,” he tells her. It doesn’t make up for ‘I miss you’ the way he’d hoped it would. She stares at him. Okay, he didn’t miss the stare.

“So you do want to ditch,” Wichita says to him two days later. 

“Well, duh,” he says, and only partly because it’s her saying it.

“Well _you_ nearly missed your window,” she says. “We’re leaving in two weeks, and if you don’t pay attention, we’ll leave without you.”

Heading out before spring crackdown – it sounds like a good plan.

Problem is, the zombies thaw faster than anyone expects.

Just a week later, a patrol that is completely normal in every way and includes some of the hardest cases on base comes back savaged. One missing. Two wounded, dispatched immediately. It’s gruesome. The base goes into lockdown.

Except Diane’s boyfriend shows up in Columbus’s bunkroom. “Heard you want to get out of here,” he says. “Want to catch a ride?”

He means the _other_ scheduled scouting mission.

He means travelling by air.

He means crossing the Atlantic.

Columbus doesn’t look the gift horse in the mouth.

* * *

John talks to Mycroft.

Mycroft is easier to find than John expected him to be; or perhaps he’s made himself available especially for John. He says, “Huntly swept; confirmed clean a week later. Good work,” with such an air of ritual, and from such a lofty height, that John hears the praise someone might give a dog. Yet there’s a certain sincerity too. Mycroft understands delegation. Funny how Sherlock’s far more blatant manipulation sits easier with John.

“Before we get on to whatever it is you needed me for,” Mycroft says, “let us discuss Sherlock.”

“Mm,” says John, trying not to let on that he’s surprised.

Mycroft’s eyebrows rise. “Oh. You’ve seen him already.”

“Yes,” John says. “He’s bored.”

There’s a pause, Mycroft frowning at him, his hand stroking over the back of a chair.

“Oh, I see,” Mycroft says at last. “You think Sherlock is in a sulk over _me_. Oh dear.” He shakes his head, clearly disappointed. “I have many uses for my brother,” he says. “They run from the delicious – zombie dissection – to the prestigious – missing documents and who might have squirrelled them away against future gain. There are few murders among the dead, but if he needed a murder, I’m sure I could produce one for him.”

There are unnerving implications to that.

“No, Sherlock hasn’t taken up community policing as his hobby to spite _me_.”

“Me?” John echoes, to Mycroft’s exaggerated nod.

“Awkward, I know,” Mycroft says. “But I think he’s jealous of you.”

It does make sense. Apparently, their friendship has survived John’s marriage to Mary – but Sherlock will not share John with a battlefield.

How like Sherlock, this jealousy. And how odd of his brother to take it seriously. Mycroft is still looking intently at John. “I see,” Mycroft says. “If Sherlock is disgruntled because of me, then I must rectify it. If he is in a sulk because of you, then it is merely a sulk.”

“What do you expect me to do?” John asks.

“Talk to him, of course,” Mycroft says, entirely reasonably. “Some sort of… motivational address.” John is sure his disbelief is showing, but Mycroft continues – still very reasonably – “It’s not how I work, but I understand it’s what ordinary people do.”

“I’m not sure what I’d say,” John says just as directly back, beginning to fight off guilt. They’re in the middle of a disaster. But Sherlock now is very much as _John_ was before he met Sherlock – shut down, closed off, living in a space marked out by pacing and with all hints of former interests erased. John says, “I can hardly take him with me.”

“Certainly not,” Mycroft says quickly. John is forcibly reminded whom Mycroft considers expendable.

“Not on the missions I do now,” John says. “He won’t work with anyone – and he’d be terrible at coaxing out survivors. However…”

Mycroft frowns. 

John is aware of his presumption: he is still merely a captain, and Mycroft is, in effect, the leader of the country, with the Prime Minister still on the Isle of Wight – but he says it anyway.

“I wouldn’t take him on a rescue mission, or a sweep,” he says. “but perhaps it’s time to go back to London.”

“Just the two of you.” Mycroft’s voice is so neutral he barely inflects the question.

“Three,” says John. “Mary likes him. Three is the right number for an observation team – any larger than that, and we start to lose stealth.” London cannot be approached by force.

“Just the two of you could keep him safe?”

“Better than anyone,” John promises. “We could do this.” He means it. “But I wouldn’t do it without him.”

* * *

The plane is full of equipment. Ted explains that it’s been stashed there for months in case zombies appear on the horizon. “I told them it’d be no good if we were overrun, of course,” he says. “You can’t take off on a runway full of zombies. But they didn’t listen. Suits me.”

So their job, in the first few dark, uneventful hours of flight, is to check everything. It feels weirdly comforting to be cleaning guns again. Columbus wonders if this is a sign that he might be turning into Tallahassee, and if he should feel encouraged by this.

Wichita still does it faster.

Watching Wichita – falling even further behind her – he thinks about reaching out and touching her. He even has a nano-flicker of an unwise thought about the mile high club. But Tallahassee and Little Rock are only halfway down the cabin, and he’s barely spoken to Wichita in the last few months, and then he wonders if they’re all already part of a mile high club – not like that. Like, the club of the last or only people travelling at this altitude. Maybe there’s nothing else alive above the clouds. It’s kind of a boner killer.

Ted calls him forward into the cockpit. “I didn’t really tell you what this is about,” he says. “Easygoing, aren’t you?”

“Well, what is it about, then?” Columbus asks coolly. Of course the timing’s weird; of course it’s weird that Ted got clearance to leave right after an attack. Columbus figured Ted was just spooked by the attack, and high-tailing it. He doesn’t really know Ted that well – he’s just seen him around.

Ted shrugs. “Me and Cole” – the camp ‘commander’ – “don’t get along,” he says. “He’s got reason not to trust me, and I guess I just proved it. What I’m saying is – how do you feel if we touch down in Europe for good?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” Columbus says. He thinks Ted is kind of a shitty boyfriend, but maybe he’ll bring that up later. “You think it’s gonna be better there?”

“Nobody knows,” Ted says. “I guess we find out when we get into their airspace, depending on whether they shoot us out of the sky.”

“Oh,” says Columbus. He can’t tell if Ted’s joking.

“There’s enough parachutes for everyone,” Ted assures him.

Okay, maybe not joking. Columbus gets to tell the others. Well, that _really_ kills all chances of the mile-high club.

A few hours later, Ted has Little Rock and Wichita in the cabin learning about all the different instruments as if Little Rock’s a kid called to visit the captain for real. He gets her to practice reading out altitude and pressure measurements and quizzes her on geography. Columbus curls up to nap just behind the bullkhead. Little Rock’s voice is the last thing he hears for a while.

When he wakes up, Little Rock and Wichita are asleep two rows away; he goes to check on Ted. Ted’s red-eyed but lucid.

“We’re nearly there,” he says, so quiet it’s more to himself than Columbus. 

“Okay,” Columbus says. It’s day out there, but there’s nothing out the cockpit windows but dense cloud. “Should I get the others ready for landing?”

“Well,” Ted says. “Wait a minute. I’m sorry about this. It’s going to be rough.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I thought I’d make it further,” Ted says. 

“Don’t we have enough fuel?”

“It’s not that.” He puts his hand to the back of his neck and pushes down his collar. There’s a raw patch there, torn skin.

“Yesterday, they got me,” he says simply.

“Wait,” Columbus says. It has to be paranoia. Ted couldn’t be infected, or… “How are you still human?”

“A lab in Michigan,” Ted says. “They had a ‘cure’ whipped up. Course, it didn’t turn out to be a cure. I saw what happened to some of the others. It just takes longer, that’s all… Like I said, the Langham folk had reason not to trust me.”

He doesn’t look away from his instruments. “I think I can feel it coming,” he says. “There’s waves of heat, and I can’t concentrate too well. Here’s what I’m hoping – I’ll get you to the ground.”

“Hope,” says Columbus, dumbstruck. He’s furious, but mostly with himself. This is what you get for not asking questions. Turns out that the offer of escape was too good to be true.

The next ninety minutes are kind of a blur. Tallahassee takes the co-pilot’s seat, in between Ted and everyone else. Ted takes one look at Tallahassee’s casual grip on a fire axe, winces, blinks, and seems to forget it a minute later. The worst part is that he starts to slur before he confirms where they’re going to land.

Wichita elbows Columbus out of the way, and he decides that’s it, that’s his excuse not to take the tension of the cockpit any more. He goes to check, one last time, that everything’s strapped down, and just doesn’t go back up front. When they break through the clouds, he glances out the windows involuntarily, sees that there’s a good amount of daylight. Then he assumes a brace position and closes his eyes.

They make it through the landing in one piece. Columbus hears someone yell something about a field; the first impact is a sort of rolling slam ( _shit, whiplash_ , he thinks) after which they bounce up and, terrifyingly, sideways-ish. One side of the plane goes way higher than the other. But they smack back down onto the level, and somehow, they’re still moving forwards. Columbus imagines the wheels broken off, the belly of the plane sliding through newly-ploughed dirt.

They stop. They’re not on fire, and no one’s screaming.

Wichita dispatches Ted.

“Did you… ask him where we were?” Columbus asks her cautiously. He wouldn’t really blame her if she were still mad at him for getting them all up in the air with a zombie-in-waiting.

“He said, if we wanted London, we should head north-west,” says Wichita. 

“ _Do_ we want London?” Columbus asks.

“Sure we do,” Tallahassee says. “I’ve never been to England before. Let’s do it right.” He turns to Little Rock and says, “Wanna see a real palace? Even better than a Hollywood one?”

Well, that does it.

It’s eerily quiet. On the plus side, no zombies appear to have been drawn to the sound of their crash; on the minus, Columbus doesn’t hear much of anything else, either. No dogs barking; no distant cars. There’s a lot of trees around, and buildings on most of the skylines. They seem to have crashed in something like a national reserve.

“Right,” he says, “I see a pylon over there. Maybe there’s a road?”

He writes a note to leave in the cockpit say they’re trying to find London. He hopes there’s someone left in the world to read it. Now that they’re on the ground, it bothers him that no one _did_ try to shoot them out of the sky.

* * *

Keeping watch over the edges of Greater London, as if it had a border, is a preposterous task. Along some stretches of the M25, there is a fence. In places, it’s netting; in other places, it’s plastic barriers left over from the Olympics; in other places, it’s a ramshackle collection of planks that might have seen a nail or two. They won’t blow away and they won’t keep zombies out for good, but they _will_ show signs if the enemy has crossed en masse.

There are military checkpoints on the main roads, and there’s a whole division devoted to circling the new boundary, checking it, and maintaining it. For thinking humans, it ought to still be possible to cross, even easy – or so John hopes. He imagines a party of travelers, having made it out of the boroughs, reaching the fence and having second thoughts about whether they’ll be welcomed on its far side. Morale is like a lot of other things: no matter how bad it is already, it can always get worse.

They’ve been dropping food packages into the city, by helicopter, every week since the main evacuation. No point in sticking around to watch who picks it up, because the noise brings the zombies out; they have to parachute them down from way up. Similarly, a lot of London still has power, and that power usage tells them a little about who’s still alive in there.

It’s a lot of people.

(One tiny little job, as they go, will be to turn out lights.)

One of Mycroft’s personal drivers takes Mary and John and Sherlock to a checkpoint near Wisley Common. There, they unload the bicycles they’ll take the rest of the way, saddlebags full of food, ammunition, and other supplies. They check in by radio and head northeast.

It’s mid-morning. They’ll cycle for as much of the day as seems safe, and pick a location to camp for the night. They’ll return to the checkpoint – or another, if things get particularly hairy – in five days.

John’s used to having Mary at his side on a sweep, but this is a little different. This, at least in the first afternoon hours, is almost light-hearted. They ride side by side. The day’s cloudy, but the air’s warm, and they’re far enough out that the smell of rot hasn’t yet begun to waft towards them. 

What lies ahead will be terrible, and yet there’s something powerful about going back into the city they’ve fled.

* * *

The pylon that Columbus spotted from the crash site leads them to a road; within less than a mile, there’s signage for Croydon, which is a name he’s heard before. Little clumps of trees and fields give way to houses. The houses are silent. Sometimes he feels like he’s beeing watched, but that’s probably hope; even silent observers would be better than a deserted world.

They’re not sure if Croydon is a suburb or a town or what, but if there are signs to the Thames from here, they sure don’t spot any.

“We can look for a train station,” Columbus says. “That ought to lead us north.”

“We have a compass,” Little Rock reminds him, waving it. But they agree that railway tracks are easier to follow.

By the time they find one, they’re ready for a break. They push through abandoned turnstiles and sit on the platform benches. A couple of pieces of trash – a plastic bag, a takeaway cup lid – down by the tracks make Columbus wonder if they haven’t landed down there recently. How fast does trash travel, or blow away?

Tallahassee breaks out the snacks. Wichita says, “Care to wait for a train?”

This, thinks Columbus, would be a good opportunity for some kind of cosmic Wizard of Oz figure to appear and yell _surprise_ about his whole life. It would sure feel that way if, as they sat placidly on their platform, a train happened to roll up. One ocean over, there’s a continent of sightless eyes and bloody jaws; just down the road, there’s a crashed plane and the corpse of a man who was still human until just a little while before he died; but for all they know, here in England, the trains are running on time.

Of course, they don’t know what _on time_ even means. They wait half an hour. Wichita’s getting restless – so is Tallahassee, but that comes out more as a blanker and blanker stare – but Columbus argues for 45 minutes, then nearly an hour. Nothing comes. Unless Columbus has counted the days wrong, and it’s Sunday, that probably means no cosmic clowning. (And even on Sunday there could have been _something_. (And Columbus hates clowns.)

On they go again, following the tracks. It’s coming on to evening.

They sleep uneasily, but they don’t encounter zombies until the next day. A pair of bodies stretched out on a station’s benches – from a distance they looked like people sleeping – shudder into movement as they approach. Wichita and Tallahassee shoot them quickly. All of them duck below the platform’s edge, waiting; they hear another zombie’s moan, but it doesn’t see them. They proceed with caution.

The overground rail takes them to a station called Canada Water; after that, the line crosses the Thames, which they all instinctively feel is a bit too far. Going west, they have the choice of the Tube or the streets, which is a no-brainer; an underground zombie attack has to be the worst position yet.

Above ground, and out from behind railway line fences, Columbus feels naked without the protection of a car. But driving wouldn’t be an option - most of the streets are blocked. They go slowly for safety as well as for purposes of gawking. Once, they escape a horde of zombies only because the first legion awakens a second legion; the two groups tear into each other with the confusion and ineptitude of blind-drunk boxers. The group watches in silent fascination behind a shattered shop window. Columbus has never seen zombies attack each other before, though movement seems to be their primary lure. Maybe somehow the two groups got out of synch on their audible-to-zombies-only frequency.

Tallahassee, it turns out, doesn’t know the way to Buckingham Palace, so instead they just follow the river. They reach the London Eye at some point after noon.

They don’t need to say anything to Little Rock; she says it herself. “No point riding on that,” she says, staring up at the wheel. “Those cars are all closed in. Useless to shoot from.”

“We could shoot out a few of the panels,” Wichita offers, studying the cars, but Little Rock shakes her head as though she’s disappointed with Wichita for trying.

“Sorry,” Columbus says, though it isn’t his fault.

London, it turns out, isn’t particularly different from Zombieland; maybe this is just the new and better edition, Zombieworld. What Columbus hates, even more than the uncertainty (is all of England like this? Is all of _America_ like this? That lab in Michigan – they didn’t manage it, but did someone else make a cure?) is how, in this unfamiliar territory, they barely dare shoot at things. They don’t know how much attention it’ll attract; how large the wave will be, and when it’ll stop coming.

Well, screw that.

He has an idea.

* * *

When John first proposed the idea to Sherlock of travelling into London, Sherlock said, “Gather information? Yes, of course. But _what_ information? What questions do you want answered?” and he looked at John as if John were an undergraduate student with a particularly poor grasp of research design.

John fobbed him off: “Don’t narrow your focus too much,” he said. And, “You’re reporting to Mycroft, not me.”

Now, as they travel, Sherlock stops and starts, arrested by things that require examination, and to any whispered question from John, he merely mutters a maddeningly brusque, “Information.”

Mary grins at John over Sherlock’s back; sometimes it helps, and sometimes it doesn’t.

He does make up for it with equally brusque comments to warn of approaching zombies – often giving sufficiently advance warning that he seems to have eyes in the back of his head.

Mary, after watching Sherlock go through a dumpster and shake a post box, points out the next dumpster they pass and asks if Sherlock is interested in that one too.

She does ask Sherlock where they’re going, but only because the three of them need to plan their resting points.

They head up the South Bank. John finds himself looking forward to the sight of Big Ben.

One of the stories John’s heard, from a woman who managed to get out of Shepherd’s Bush three days after England’s Patient Zero passed through Heathrow, is that somehow, government agents will stop the clock, and it will be a signal – marking an hour of day at which troops will arrive to shepherd people out of the city, or perhaps the time of judgment when London will be bombed from the air. (An image that has no less power for having already occurred.)

Either of those visitations – even destruction – is probably preferable to the idea that no one is coming at all.

Sherlock ducks abruptly into a building, forcing a lock and leading them up several flights of stairs. (That is, he tries to lead, before Mary says, “ _No_ you don’t,” and takes point.) Coming at last to a floor he deems sufficiently high, he stares out on the vista.

Mary goes to sweep the floor; John watches the watcher.

Finally, he says, “What are you looking for?”

Another minute of silence goes by. Then, sounding surprised, Sherlock says, “Not that.”

He points, and after a little while, John sees it too. 

The London Eye has begun to move.

* * *

Columbus thought it would take two hours to set up, tops, but it actually takes the better part of a day. The part with the Eye’s settings is fiddly and tedious, but still steady going, because they’re doing their tinkering in a covered location with a low risk of drawing attention. The tricky part is dragging obstacles around the vast base of the ferris wheel; barbed wire, flechettes, and volatiles aren’t exactly among their supplies.

Finally, they break to eat, then they set the timer and then set themselves up at a comfortable sniping distance. Columbus is sure it isn’t going to work – either the London Eye isn’t going to start at all, or it’s going to turn with the silence and smooth slowness of stars – but then, brilliantly, it does. There is a wonderful, awesome nails-on-chalkboard creak that functions as a clarion call. The zombies swarm – but towards the sound and movement, not towards the humans in their sniper nest.

It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

As the zombies pack themselves in, each shot has more impact, in more ways than one: the force ripples through the mass and the sound drives them into a further frenzy. Little Rock’s lips are parted on a silent howl of delight – there, for sure, is a bloodthirsty smile – as she watches the monsters tear each other apart. So far, the barriers are working. Some zombies, climbing on top of each other, manage to grab on to the cars as they pass, but those that do seem to run out of goals once they have achieved this: there is no movement _within_ the glass to spur them on. Most drop off the car they have latched on to as it gains height.

They can pace themselves. Each shot they make is slow and careful – it’s target practice now. 

Thing is, the zombies can pace themselves too. They come in waves. They walk up from the banks of the Thames – which confirms Columbus’ theory about zombies being kind of nonchalant about oxygen – and pour in around the Eye’s base. Without something obvious to chase, they’re not moving at the top observed zombie speed, but they’re relentless. Columbus has a vision of even Europe’s largest ferris wheel turning into a seething, once-human anthill.

They should plan to leave themselves enough ammo to beat a retreat, he knows. He catches Tallahassee’s eye, and Little Rock’s, and they pause to consult.

It’s tempting to keep shooting. But the zombies will outlast them, and sooner or later they’ll have to – 

A green paintball bursts in front of them. They turn to see its source; the person who fired it is a tall, dark-haired man, standing next to a bicycle, who has managed to get within fifty feet of them. He says, “Stop.”

* * *

“I have what I need now,” Sherlock tells them. “You can stop. You have a way of controlling it remotely, don’t you? Or something to shoot at from here, I assume.”

“Yes, all right,” the boy says. “But we have to time it – when it stops, the zombies will come back to _us_ …”

“No; too much of a cumulative effect. The pile-up below the Eye will confuse any newcomers. You can turn it off.” The man is scowling; Sherlock waits a beat before adding, “Or you can destroy a city icon. Hardly a model of good tourism.”

“How did you know…”

“He just does,” John cuts in.

“I’m impressed, really,” Sherlock tells them – which impresses _John_. “But your little game has achieved what it needed to.”

The younger girl crosses her arms. “So what was that?”

“A census, of course.”

They blink at him; all but the woman. John notes that at no point in the conversation have all of them looked away from the Eye at once.

“Come on,” Sherlock says. “Assuming, of course, you want safe passage out of London.”

“We only just got here,” the man drawls.

“Don’t worry,” Sherlock says. “You’ll be back.”

John says, “Sherlock…”

“I told you,” he replies. “I know, now. We’ve discovered how many zombies there are, and the stimulus they react to. We’ve observed the places people gather, and how connected they are, and how they communicate. We’re done.”

Out of modesty, John would object to the ‘we’ part of this – he has merely observed a rotting city – but he suspects Sherlock is using it as a shortcut to legitimacy among these people who don’t know him. 

“I can tell you when we’ll return,” Sherlock finishes; it may be posturing, but John believes him.

They all do.

He leads them across the Hungerford Bridge and briefly north; when a group of five zombies lurches out of an alley, Mary takes off ahead on her bicycle, and the rest shoot down the ones who pursue her, with little comment. It’s done smoothly.

“Thank you,” Sherlock says abruptly, twenty minutes later, as though he’s just remembered. And, “I hope you did turn off the London Eye. You had some kind of remote set-up, of course, didn’t you?”

“Of course,” the boy says dryly. “I did it 35 minutes ago.”

Behind them, the skyline is as still as a postcard.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks very much to donutsweeper for checking sense and flow, and to kangeiko for Britpicking and some creative suggestions for plot holes. Any nonsense that remains is my bad; most of the sense is due to them. And hopefully most of the remaining nonsense is the good kind.


End file.
